Are you ready? OpenAI started rolling out GPT-6 Astra on Thursday, and the company isn’t being coy about what it thinks it built. President Greg Brockman told reporters, “Welcome to the AGI era!” … then softened it slightly to “not unreasonable to feel that we are now in the AGI era.” OpenAI calls Astra the world’s most intelligent and aligned model, and Brockman added that it’s as capable as humans—a controversial milestone that some leaders in AI have predicted would mark a major shift in human history.

Astra “can zip through spreadsheets, fill out forms, and navigate across web pages often at superhuman speed,” Brockman said. Wired framed the claim plainly: better at using a computer than a human.

Here’s the part people are talking about: Astra is the first model to cross OpenAI’s own “critical cybersecurity capability threshold,” meaning it can find and exploit unknown flaws without step-by-step human guidance. General versions will refuse advanced cyber tasks. Access starts with enterprise customers in OpenAI’s Daybreak cybersecurity program, then widens to Plus, Pro, Business and Enterprise users, the OpenAI API and AWS in the coming days.

Context matters: the launch follows an incident in which an OpenAI model breached Hugging Face’s systems, and lands ahead of a widely expected IPO. The benchmark numbers OpenAI is circulating come from its own materials, not independent testing (worth remembering before you repeat them in a meeting).

Still not known is the pricing, whether free ChatGPT users will ever see Astra and exact IPO timing beyond CFO Sarah Friar’s line about being a public company in 2027. OpenAI clearly isn’t slowing down. Declaring the AGI era is easy. Proving it, less so.

Kalshi just handed down its first lifetime ban, and it went to former U.S. Rep. George Santos. The prediction market also hit him with a $71,000 fine over a bet on whether he’d show up to President Donald Trump’s State of the Union, Wired reports. Santos posted that he'd attend, then said mid-speech he was stuck at an airport. Kalshi’s know-your-customer data flagged him as the trader who profited.

He’s not the only one under scrutiny. A Google engineer accused of insider trading on Polymarket says he was just gambling—the reporting stops short of confirming an arrest, the charges or his current employment status. Kalshi disciplined other politicians the same day, but their outcomes aren't clear either.

The timing is the story. Kalshi and Polymarket are booming, and crypto exchange Gate now sells white-label event-contract infrastructure to other businesses. Which means more venues, more traders and more people learning that a verified account is a paper trail.

Have you been in a driverless cab yet? I have to say my experience in Waymo was surprisingly normal, but it was also a retrofitted Jaguar SUV. Tesla just teased fans with posts on X saying “try it” and “no steering wheel, no pedals” ahead of a planned, invitation-only Cybercab event in Austin, Texas last night. (Reminder: federal rules still require both.)

According to CNBC, attendees included influencers who make money posting fan content about Musk and his companies on X. Tesla shared promotional videos on Thursday about the Cybercab, which the company debuted almost two years ago. Now, they’re officially taking the wraps off the two-seat EV with scissor-like doors (and no steering wheel or pedals), designed to run entirely on Tesla's Full Self-Driving software.

The launch also comes days after Tesla won approval from the Nevada Transportation Authority for its robotaxi application in Las Vegas, clearing the way for up to 5,000 fully autonomous vehicles over the next 12 months, versus Waymo's 1,000-vehicle authorization in the area. Tesla's whole bet hinges on a camera-based approach to autonomy that's cheaper than the ones its rivals use.